Twitter’s live streaming app Periscope gets an analytics dashboard

1 year

Trying to figure out this whole live video broadcasting thing? Good news!

Periscope, the Twitter-owned live-broadcasting app, picked up a new trick this morning: a shiny new analytics dashboard.

It’s not the most groundbreaking thing in the world, but it makes sense. Making a successful live video on the internet — particularly one that doesn’t involve video games or naked people — is hard. It’s the reason why company after company in this space has failed: Most people just aren’t that interesting all the time.

Perhaps a bit of data on what works and what doesn’t is the key to cracking the code.

Periscope’s analytics dashboard will track video duration, number of viewers, hearts and time watched per viewer. Hopefully they can expand into providing data on a minute-per-minute basis tied to your stream’s replay so you can start to learn exactly where you’re losing people, but this is a solid start.

Meanwhile, Twitter also announced that Periscopes will now be viewable live within the company’s curated news stories, Moments, as the company continues to push into live video across the platform. Don’t count on having your story show up in a Moment — there’s a whole lot of serendipity required there (right place, right time and noticed by the curation team) — but when it works, it could be a good fit.